Love Twitter; Hate Twitter Spam

Do you hate Twitter spam as much as I do?

Do you want to tell new followers who have zero updates but 462 followers to fuck off?

I love Twitter. It's fun, easy, entertaining and sometimes (depending on who you follow, I suppose) it's emotional. I don't follow people just for the heck of it. I check out their tweets and if I like what I read, then I follow. I'm not in this to build a huge cult following. Yeah, it's cool to see that new people are following, but sometimes (and more frequently the past few weeks) it's just bullshit.

A lot of people seem to being going for this type of crap:

"Hey, check it out, I have a pyramid scheme that will net you 200 new followers a day!"

• Small, tiny tiny print: But just so you know, every single one of those is either a blank account with no updates or it's just a link to a porn site.

I've been told to just ignore them. What can it hurt to have people follow you who don't actually read your updates? Especially if they hardly ever tweet, so they aren't screwing up your Twitter stream?

I know, I know. But I just can't do it. I try to be a good Twitterer, Tweeter, Twatter, whatever. When I get a new follower, I check out his/her updates and if they're a "real" person and if I like what I read I follow back. So every time I get a new follower who is just a spammer it winds up being a waste of my time to go check them out. And that pisses me off. Mostly because now I don't want to waste time checking out new followers and I might miss a really good one.

So if you are:

1. a new follower
2. actually reading this
3. you aren't one of those people who knows everything about social media and that's all you tweet about

feel free to @ me and tell me so and I'll be happy to follow back.

Sincerely,
woubie

PS If you just want me to sign up to see pictures of you, the least you could do is provide a couple of frees ones to reel me in.

Twitter isn't a popularity contest

I've been using Twitter for a few months now and the media buzz and chatter about celebrities undeservedly getting tons of followers and regular people getting few is amusing to me. If you join Twitter under the impression that its a popularity contest you'll probably be disappointed. If you join thinking its a popularity contest that you can WIN then you'll definitely be disappointed.

I initially joined to see if it could be useful for business and I think that there are certain ways businesses can benefit from it. But overall I've found that, for me, its just the hi-tech version of what I used to do as a kid. I would pluck a book out of the set of encyclopedias and starting flipping through until something caught my eye. I'd read about whatever it was and it invariably led to me reading about something else. Twitter does that for me.

It took a week or so for me to realize that a lot of people on Twitter are there purely for business and a good portion of those people are "social media experts" who rarely seem to post anything except "what to do or not do on Twitter". Once I figured that out I started searching for people based on topics I'm interested in. I picked a few of those people and checked out who they follow and picked a few of those too.
Along the way I've stumbled across a few others who have turned out the be some of my favorites. In the spirit of Twitter sharing here a handful of those:

• @clusterflock (interesting group of people who all blog at (http://clusterflock.org)
• @lisacraze (every post is in haiku form)
• @headmutha (http://www.mffo.org/)
• @robluketic (yes, its true, I too follow some celebrities. So shoot me. This guy's behind the scenes photos while making his movie are cool and his dog, a Weimeraner, is very photogenic.)

So after 2 months I follow a nice mix of people who I can count on to find and post things for me on a daily basis that will amuse me, arouse my curiosity, teach me something new, make me think, make me laugh out loud, introduce me to new music, and yes, sometimes bore me. But the boring things aren't all that bad either. Being reminded that the majority of the world does all of the same mundane things I do and also needs coffee to get-up-n-go in the morning makes me feel better about my regular boring life.

In return I try to post, re-tweet and comment on things that I think others may find interesting. If they do - cool. If they don't - its no skin off of my Twitter nose.